Digital Libraries & Users with Disabilities
Annotated Bibliography by Sarah Donetti
The research by Ekwelem (2013) asserts users with disabilities will not be able to access digital libraries at all if users cannot access the systems and institutions containing the digital library collections in the first place. In order to understand whether or not users with disabilities in Nigerian academic libraries had sufficient means to access electronic resources, the author conducted a study where participants with either visual impairments or mobile impairments attempted to access electronic resources at different academic library sites within the country. The results of the study indicated most of the participants were not able to access electronic resources beyond audiobooks or the online public access catalog, including many instances where participants could not even access a computer to engage with electronic resources due to physical barriers such as a lack of wheelchair ramps. The article includes several striking photographs of individuals unable to access resources. These images should give researchers an understanding of the real-world implications when accessibility is not present. The article also shows why legal protections for users with disabilities are important, as the author points out that in Nigeria there is no equivalent to the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure equal access to digital materials. Recommendations made by the author that can be applied to future digital libraries work include an account of accessibility tools the studied libraries did not implement, but should, and workplace accommodation strategies.
This paper provides an overview of how the blind and visually impaired interact with digital libraries as well as international projects underway to increase digital library access to this user population. Golub (2002) notes the lack of available research regarding how blind and visually impaired users interact with digital libraries and provides ideas for LIS researchers to pursue. These include topics such as the development of screen readers for lesser known languages, overcoming barriers to book scanning for blind users, and international cooperation in establishing standards for accessibility on the web and in digital libraries. While these research ideas may not be incredibly recent, the fact that Golub’s (2002) ideas are still being cited by research such as Higgins’ (2013) many years later shows these research gaps in the digital library field have yet to be filled and deserve to be examined by current LIS professionals.
Higgins’ (2013) article includes individuals with physical disabilities as “disadvantaged” users alongside “traditional minorities…persons with lower levels of income and education, those living in rural areas…as well as developing countries as a whole” (p. 2) because they face many of the same general challenges, such as lack of education and career opportunities. The article asserts these divisions have carried over into the realm of digital libraries, despite digital media often being hailed as a boon to access for those with physical disabilities. The main barriers to access highlighted by the article are a lack of consistent accessibility standards applied across different electronic resource platforms and the lack of a broad selection of digitized materials for individuals with disabilities. The latter barrier is further blamed on stringent copyright laws and intellectual property owners refusing to make materials available for digitization in accessible formats due to fear digitized materials will be abused. Higgins (2013) makes the important point that individuals with physical disabilities can have the same interests in popular works and materials as able-bodied individuals. This should play a factor in LIS professionals’ decisions regarding what materials to digitize, and so the author is careful to point out that resources and energy should not be dedicated solely to the digitization of specialized materials.
Digital library access for users with disabilities is not just an issue in countries where digital accessibility is already common. In this thesis Khachatryan (2014) researches the state of access to digital libraries and services for users with disabilities in the country of Armenia, conducting a specific study with the librarians of the National Library of Armenia as well as local individuals with various disabilities regarding what they perceive as barriers to digital library service and use. The results of the interviews reveal what appears to be a cycle of pessimism among librarians preventing further development for access to users with disabilities from occurring. The librarians interviewed perceive a lack of users with disabilities seeking out their services. This occurred even where there is a demand from users with disabilities for digital materials. It was discovered that this demand cannot be met due to factors such as a lack of governmental funding or opportunities for further training among librarians to handle accessibility issues. The users with disabilities, on the other hand, do not claim their reasoning for lack of library use is because they do not have a desire for digital media. Instead these users perceive the librarians as having a lack of training and the library a lack of useful resources. Khachatryan (2014) ultimately concludes that, while it is true there are barriers to digital libraries in Armenia like a lack of funding, the librarians are still duty-bound to “act as non-discriminator” (p. 46) and they are showing a lack of initiative to improve their digital libraries. The thesis provides steps for how the librarians can begin to improve their digital libraries, steps other LIS researchers can note and possibly apply in situations where digital libraries lack accessibility due to lack of funding. Overall, this thesis is an example of the kind of research regarding the subject of users with disabilities that needs to occur more often in the LIS literature.
In order for research to be understandable and applicable, communication of what key terms mean must be clear. However, Kleynhans and Fourie (2014) assert current literature in the library and information science (LIS) field discussing disabilities (particularly visual impairments) does not clearly define terms like “visually impaired” or “accessibility,” hampering further research developing accessibility frameworks for users with disabilities as a whole and specifically users who are blind or visually impaired. To establish definitions future LIS research can derive from, Kleynhans and Fourie (2014) examine and explain classification systems from the World Health Organization as well as the dominant models of disability. These systems and models are connected to specific applications within research design, giving readers the opportunity to consider questions such as “What classification of ‘visual impairment’ is most appropriate to define the participants desired for this study?” and “How will framing digital library accessibility within the medical model of disability differ from a framing within the social model of disability?” This article is important because it defines disability issues for LIS researchers and gives professional resources to refer to when defining terms for research about digital libraries and users with disabilities. While the article specifically focuses on visual impairments, these resources could be used in the future to establish definitions and frameworks for other disabilities.
Moeller’s (2010) report provides research regarding the effects of re-tooling a digital library interface to accommodate students with various disabilities. As the digital library is for educational purposes, the report contains interviews and surveys of both teachers who incorporated the digital library content into their lesson plans as well as students who interacted with the digital library content themselves, making comparisons between how the adapted accessible interface is used and how the original interface was used. Moeller (2010) found in most cases the use of the adapted interface resulted in less time searching for content within the digital library, teachers allowing for more independent learning opportunities in the classroom (as opposed to presenting everything themselves in front of the class), and greater student approval of the resources and lessons. However, there were a few instances where teachers of certain types of disabilities showed no change in how the adapted digital library affected their lessons (as was the case for teachers of deaf/hearing impaired students) or showed less use of different media types and less indication using the digital library benefited the students’ learning (as was the case for teachers of blind/visually impaired students). Moeller (2010) suggests this means students with certain disabilities may benefit more from accessibility tools than students with other kinds of disabilities—an important reminder to researchers within the field that disabilities and accessibility are not a “one-size-fits-all” proposition. While the resource only makes conclusive statements about the specific digital library being used, it provides a good model of how future research within the field can be conducted in other digital library scenarios and on a larger scale. In particular, researchers should consider replicating Teachers’ Domain’s user profiles that can be customized for individual accessibility needs, as this feature may help in overcoming barriers for multiple disabilities.
Southwell & Slater (2012) sought to better understand the state of content accessibility within digital libraries for users with visual impairments. In order to accomplish this, they conducted a study of 69 academic libraries’ digital special collections and whether or not randomly selected digitized textual pieces from the collections were readable using popular screen readers and accessibility software. 42 percent of the digitized materials reviewed were accessible via screen reader—a result the researchers concluded was below accessibility standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In addition to pointing out factors that improve screen reader accessibility for digitized text works, such as transcripts or OCR text accompanying items, Southwell & Slater (2012) call for further research regarding digital collections accessibility, iterative testing to continually improve accessibility of digital collections, and emphasize the need for “main informational content of a digitized item” (p. 464) to be understandable by screen readers, “not just the navigational and brief descriptive information around the digital object” (p. 464). The article effectively builds on previous accessibility research and applies it specifically to the current state of digital collections in relation to visual disabilities. The literature review makes a note of why, from a pragmatic perspective, accessibility is a high-stakes issue for libraries receiving government funding: if accessibility is not addressed, funding could be at stake due to legal provisions like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. The article also provides specific examples of screen readers and software that future researchers can use to further test accessibility.
This article describes the development and implementation of The DAISY Consortium and its DAISY standards for “digital talking books” (p. 936) for the “print impaired” (p. 936). Digital library researchers will find this article important because The DAISY Consortium’s work, compared to other initiatives and research of digital libraries and users with impairments, started fairly early in the life cycle of digital libraries. The consortium is also a successful example of international cooperation in creating digital resource standards for users with disabilities. DAISY technology is unique in that it assists print disabilities beyond just blindness or visual impairment, including dyslexia and learning disabilities. Future researchers may look to the example of successful use of DAISY technology in digital library services for users with disabilities and use it as inspiration for further work in accessibility for print disabilities beyond blindness.
Blind individuals already face challenges navigating the internet due to its very visual nature. Current digital library research already suggests digital library interfaces must improve both explicit and implicit help cues in order to assist users caught in difficult help-seeking situations. Xie, Babu, Joo, and Fuller (2015) attempted to fill a gap within the research regarding how blind individuals interact specifically with digital library interfaces by selecting fifteen blind web users, directing them to attempt using a digital library to explore pre-selected research questions for thirty minutes, and recording their responses and thought processes during the information retrieval process. This resulted in the identification of help-seeking situations blind users find themselves in when facing difficulty with the digital library interface—many of which are unique to the blind user experience, such as “Avoidance of visual items” (p. 24) due to anticipated lack of alternative text and “Difficulty in recognising page loading status” (p. 16) due to the lack of any cue given to the screen reader. The research importantly identifies blind users of digital libraries have a need for explicit and implicit help cues almost completely different from non-blind users’ help-seeking situations and provides suggestions for how to implement these cues. While Xie et al. (2015) recognize their exploratory research had a small sample size and did not exhaustively explore all possible reasons help-seeking situations occur, they accomplished their goal of beginning to fill a gap within digital library research that future researchers can use as inspiration for further studies.
This article provides the specific example of a digital library targeted at the blind and visually impaired in China and explains how it was established, its advantages over traditional libraries, current accessibility standards implemented on the digital library’s website, and goals for future developments to increase accessibility. For those unfamiliar with what an accessible digital library should look like, Zhang, Lirong, and Chunming (2012) provide a description both clear and succinct. Their inclusion of a discussion of web design shows the importance of the research of the web design field to digital library accessibility. As the library described in the article provides materials most closely resembling a public library, researchers may want to read this article as a complement to research such as Moeller (2010) to compare and contrast the accessibility tools and standards emphasized for digital libraries with different purposes.
